Innovation Nation

Living and Learning

Live together and participate in a community designed to your academic, social and personal needs.You’re hard working and results oriented. You’re creative and a problem solver. That’s why you want to be part of the College of Business community. And we want you to feel like a full-fledged part of our heritage from the moment you set foot on our campus. That’s why we’ve set up Innovation Nation.

Innovation Nation

Innovation Nation is the name College of Business students have given to our living–learning community for first-year pre-business students. You’ll live in one of our three business-themed residence halls – Weatherford, Poling, or the ILLC Global Village – where you’ll dive into a variety of learning opportunities created with people like you in mind. People who want to design, create and build their futures in ways that improve lives and communities.

You’ll engage faculty and your fellow students through mentoring and collaboration in an environment promoting a learning-focused, student-first, open-door culture that makes the big Oregon State campus feel like the supportive place it is – and feel a lot smaller and easier to navigate than you might be fearing. You’ll learn to think critically, to appreciate diversity, to develop a mindset of service, to cultivate a global perspective.

You’ll have access to a high-tech makerspace, and social events and symposiums with executives and entrepreneurs. You’ll even take some of your classes in your residence hall, including the fall term B-Engaged course and the two-course Innovation Nation series.

Why a Living–Learning Community?

Why do we think Innovation Nation will help you earn success at the College of Business? Because research shows living–learning communities like ours will help you develop intellectually as well as socially. It will make you more persistent in your work and make you feel more connected to your classmates, college and university. You’ll feel supported, because you are. And you’ll become more involved in the kinds of extracurricular activities that help you take charge of your own learning and help drive you toward the education and career you want. (Read below for research findings that demonstrate the importance of living–learning communities.)

Why a Living-Learning Community? Experts weigh in

Living–learning communities create great educational experiences; that’s why Innovation Nation is a core part of what it means to be a first-year pre-business student in the College of Business. But you don’t have to take our word for it, exclusively. Many researchers have studied the impact of living–learning communities and found participation in them has high positive correlations with student academic and intellectual performance, campus engagement, and overall satisfaction with the college experience.

Research shows students participating in living–learning communities are more:

Academically successful in college, which translates to greater likelihood of success after graduation.

Engaged in the campus community and in their academic college, leading to greater satisfaction and a more meaningful experience.

Ready for the workforce, setting them apart from their peers for internships and job opportunities through network connections with engaged alumni.

If you’re seeking the details, check out these studies and their results:

Participating in living–learning communities is uniformly and positively linked with student academic performance, engagement in educationally fruitful activities (such as academic integration, active and collaborative learning, and interaction with faculty members), gains associated with college attendance, and overall satisfaction with the college experience (Zhao and Kuh, 2004).

Students who participate in living–learning communities are more engaged overall, have higher persistence rates, and showed greater gains in intellectual and social development compared with peers who did not participate in the communities (Shapiro and Levine, 1999).

Higher well-being of recent graduates is related to their experiences while in college. Graduates who felt “supported” during college (that professors cared, that professors made them excited about learning, and had a mentor) are nearly three times as likely to be thriving than those who didn’t feel supported (2014 Gallup-Purdue Index Report).